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But that’s not what politicians with absolutely no scientific or medical credentials are telling me.
I thought we already knew, it’s a spectrum
The ‘spectrum’ terminology comes about from the field of peychology only being able to attempt to analyze … basically, ‘symptoms’, behavioral profiles, phenotypes, and also the field of psychology constantly changing how it does those analyses as well as categorize observable behaviors into conditions/disorders.
What this new understsnding is pointing toward is that there is an actual, identifiable, genomic variance of mutation clusters that actually explains how differences in that spectrum of ‘symptoms’ actually work, what actually causes which ones.
A spectrum suggests varying degrees of a single condition, and would be compatible with both the hypothesis that all occurrences of this condition share a cause and the hypothesis of multiple causes. So to claim there are multiple causes is different from saying that cases fall on a spectrum. It tells you that multiple conditions can appear the same way, so they get diagnostically grouped together based on symptoms even though the underlying causes, and so the appropriate treatments, can be quite different.
Scientists concluded this in the 1990s, and then had to produce yet another study to unequivocally state it again after every time someone claimed to have found the “cause”.
This is part of the reason it was re-named ASD in the first place; it describes a set of atypical neurological development symptoms, not an identifiable state of being. Kind of like “cancer” describes an atypical cellular reproductive state, not a pathogen attacking your cells. Both can be caused by many different factors or combination of factors.
Of course, with ASD, it doesn’t even mean there’s anything particularly wrong most of the time; just atypical, resulting in a person whose thoughts are weighted differently than historically typical, with less interpretation of social cues and a greater ability to focus.
This seems similar to the phenomenon where antidepressants are only effective for about 15% of patients. The benefit is large for those who benefit. For the rest, they’re no better than placebo, suggesting the drugs treat one of several causes for the syndrome known as depression.
Yeah but we’re not allowed to talk about how that 85% has been prescribed stuff that doesn’t help them, very often has negative, deleterious, harmful mental and physical sideeffects, oh and also often cause dependency/addiction.
Because then when you look at it that way, that would mean basically all currently active, prescribing pscyhiatrists would be open to malpractice lawsuits, and/or drugmakers would be open to gigantic class action lawsuits.
You know, like with opioid pain killers?
But uh nope, nope, that can’t be allowed to be considered, so … just don’t talk about it.
Doctors are generally not subject to malpractice suits for engaging in what was believed to be the best practice at the time. That’s how it should be, because that’s how science works.
Knowing that antidepressants don’t work for most people presents a difficult problem though. There is no test to determine whether they will work other than trying them for months. Never trying them would be unethical because they can be life saving and life changing for those who respond. Using them indiscriminately is also unethical because they have side effects and withdrawal symptoms.
Doctors are generally not subject to malpractice suits for engaging in what was believed to be the best practice at the time. That’s how it should be, because that’s how science works.
We electroshocked and then lobotomized the patient, they’re basically a 4 year old now mentally, but thats all fine because the science at the time said so.
We smoked in our office consults with pregnant women, but thats all fine because science said so at the time.
… Uh, nah, no, at least from a morality perspective.
So, so much tangible quantifiable financial damage done to so many people by sideffects and then meds for those sideffects…
Legally, yeah, maybe not malpractice if … thats the actual legal standard, maybe it falls on the drug mfgrs legally, but uh what ever happened to harm reduction, is it now maybe time to have some kind of actual reckoning with this as a field/industry?
To me, at this point, in the US, psychiatrists are basically very snobby and arrogant drug salesmen, who will confidently tell you they know what they’re doing and then oops turns out they don’t.
Your second paragraph illustrates this perfectly.
Don’t even have a method of assessing how any of this should work.
Just no clue, none, might as well be popping random pills at a rave, nearly the same epistemic level of ‘will this do what the person i got it from said it will’, difference being stuff from a psych is very unlikely to be cut.
This is is mad scientist level shit.
15% chance it works, 85% chance it doesn’t, you’re all experimental test subjects actually who were not informed of that.
I dunno about you but I don’t tend to trust people who tell me to do something and tell me its all very well understood, and then oh haha, no it isn’t.
I had MDD for a while and my psychs ran me through an ever increasing gauntlet of drugs for it that justade everything worse and worse, to the point I now have them all listed as things I am allergic to, turns out I just needed less stress and pressurr in my life and to get away from my abusive family.
This should be a nationwide scandal.
None of those things are “fine”. They just shouldn’t result in penalties for individual doctors who were following established best practices.
The problem should be addressed at institutional and structural levels. Drug companies shouldn’t be allowed to throw away 30 studies with inconclusive results and get approved based only on the two with positive results. Drugs that work by inducing a structural change like SSRIs shouldn’t be approved for indefinite use, and if that evidence is found after their initial approval, the approval should be amended. Drug companies should never have been allowed to advertise that depression is a “chemical imbalance in the brain” which is corrected by their drugs when there was never evidence for that beyond the drugs having an effect.
with less interpretation of social cues and a greater ability to focus.
“ability to focus” is more accurately described as “tendency to focus”. “ability to focus” connotes control over focus, which… from lived experience and what I’ve read, just isn’t generally true. Autistic inertia – the inability to defocus and then focus on a new context – is very real. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder not just because of an ignorance of social cues but because of how rigid, inflexible patterns of behavior often interfere with daily life.
Autist here:
Yeah, describing it as simply ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’ ability to control or maintain focus is… well, too simplistic.
I can, when it comes to task, hyperfocus on something like writing a piece of complex code / software, try to solve a real world engineering problem, do a comprehensive data analysis of some topic, write a chapter of a novel… I can hyperfocus on that for a solid day or week or month, and I have to actively remind myself to do things like eat and sleep regularly, because I know I tend to get obsessively focused on ‘the task’.
Shifting to another task, another very different … realm of thinking, or way of thinking, is often very jarring and exhausting.
But on the flip side, when socializing, people tend to say I am scatter brained, overwhelming, because I just flow all the way through my entire chain of concept associations to end up with a resulting… thing I am trying to say.
Sort of like how modern agentic AI has an ‘explain its thinking process’ mode.
Thats just the default for me, its all an explicit, conscious train of thought.
For me, summarizing that chain of thought into just a resultant ‘thing to say’ is the difficult part, that I get worse at the more mentally exhausted I am.
Also, I would say most, not all, but most autists… its not that we are inattentive to or ignorant of social cues.
Its that neurotypicals tend to process social cues mostly subconsciously, whereas autists tend to process social cues mostly consciously…
… and that most neurotypicals actually all have widely variable, inconsistent and imprecise standards by which they judge and perform social cues, but most of them are unaware of this, to the point that they are overly confident that everyone has the same rubric and understanding of social cues as they do, when this very obviously is not the case.
So, this confuses/overwhelms many/most autists, because they are presented with an inconsistent and variable ruleset, and then also told that this ruleset is consistent and invariable.
Neurotypicals will often get angry/rude/frustrated/overwhelmed when you try to break this down explain this to them, presumably because they largely are not aware of / do not have this explicit, conscious thought process, and tend to interperet being asked to formulate it in consistent, precise detail just as a rude thing to ask for.
Basically, imo, NTs use a fuzzy, fast, less accurate, mostly unconscious heuristic to evaluate and perform social cues, and they tend to be very confident they are doing this correctly…
… whereas Autists tend to logically and consciously go through an entire evaluation system, which is more robust and thorough in that its basically a discrete series of probabilistic associations, but this is all much slower, much more ‘computationally costly’ to perform.
So, when an Autist is oversocialized, under too much pressure to perform socially, they can get overwhelmed and then either basically shutdown or freak out.
This also works, imo, to explain why Autists tend to take longer to initially learn socialization cues and concepts… because they are having to build a much more conscious, step by step evaluation model of all possible micro/macro expressions, tonal shifts, inflexions, vocab choices, all possibly relevant context, etc, and this can often be much more difficult to establish when Neurotypicals are nearly entirely unaware of or dismissive of their own inconsistencies and variability when it comes to those things.
This also works to explain by Autists are often seen as overly straightforward or blunt: They’re just telling you the result of their attempt to evaluate a social interaction.
And this also explains why almost no NT person I’ve ever met can accurately assess my emotional state / social interaction disposition, yet they almost all are very confident they can do so correctly and precisely.
But chief US stientists have discovered that it’s all caused by Tylenol!
If you’re smart, you’ll buy Tylenol stock and bank on the rebound.
That’s not true. RFK Jr recently said it was from circumcisions.
If you take tylonol for the soreness after being circumcised you are 100% going to catch the autism.
In other words, “Scientists Conclude Both Trump & RFK Jr. Are Utter A**holes For Believing Autism Is Caused By Tylenol, And You Should Be Voting For Democrats Instead”
You’re allowed to say assholes on the Internet
But you aren’t allowed to call HitlerPig an asshole. Or HitlerPig either, but it’s too late for me, I’m already on a bunch of lists.
Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits fart turds and twat.
Ratshit batshit dirty old twat! 69 assholes tied in a knot! Hooray, lizardshit, FUCK!
I heard that being liberal makes you autistic.
Welcome to 2015. This is not new.
Sometimes it’s worth having new studies that add confirmation and detail to conclusions people have already reached. This article does seem to be reporting on new research.
If autism isn’t a single condition, why do we lump everyone who’s autistic into the same bucket? You’ve got the people that like trains and struggle with social cues and are sensitive to sound, and the people who broke their carer’s arm because their DVD boxset of Dexter’s Lab had a disc in the wrong place, and yes both are autistic, but it’s unhelpful because when someone says they’re autistic, you have no idea what that means.
I know there’s levels depending on how much care you need, but nobody’s going “I’m level 1 autistic” in daily conversation. It’s not like cancer where you can say “I have cancer” or “My dad died of cancer” and you can then say “It was prostate cancer”, because everyone knows what that means.
If autism isn’t a single condition, why do we lump everyone who’s autistic into the same bucket?
Why do we talk about the autism spectrum like it’s a disease (or a bunch of diseases)? The only problem with autistic people is that they live in a society that is made for non-autistic people and it actively punishes them for being different. Kind of like with LGBT people, though I’d say a lot worse in this case. There’s nothing stopping people in the spectrum from functioning similarly or better than ‘regular’ people, other than the aforementioned society.
Cancer also has “stages” that people generally are aware of.
The only reason is that more is known about cancers than about the physiological basis of different psychological conditions. Psychology often has to work at the level of grouping symptoms because it’s difficult and takes a long time to discover any neurological and/or genetic causes behind them.
If autism isn’t a single condition, why do we lump everyone who’s autistic into the same bucket?
What categories could they use from the start to differentiate subconditions to avoid this? Experts couldn’t say if it was one disease or many, but they could tell they’re all closely related.
Investigating health is hard and only hindsight is 20/20.
Asperger’s used to be a categorisation, but they got rid of it because 1. The guy who came up with it was a Nazi and used it as a means of segregating those he didn’t intend to murder from those he did, and 2. the border between Autistic and Aspergers was pretty vague and whether you got the diagnosis was dependent on the culture of the clinic doing the diagnosing and not any objective criteria.
I dunno, it feels (obviously irrationally) a little bit insulting that there isn’t a categorisation, because by lumping everyone who previously had Asperger’s in with Autism, it doesn’t matter how well you mask, as soon as you mention you’re autistic, everyone thinks you’re one wrong word away from having a meltdown. Nobody sees levels, they see Autism, and what was formerly known as Asperger’s, where the latter are a bit weird, and the former are in need of serious care.
the people that like trains and struggle with social cues and are sensitive to sound
Well there goes the last shred of doubt I had that I’m high masking AuDHD.
It’s not new information, and it’s simple stereotypical stuff, but something about the way you phrased it made it hit different.
My kid is exactly like me, so learning how to deal with my issues is doubly valuable.
Trying to conclude “what it’s caused by” is driven by wanting it to be over with. It’s been researched, we found a reason, move on to something else.
Whats the reason?
In other news: scientists reconfirmed the wheel to be round.
Great so now I’ve been downing Tylenol for no reason?
FUCK!
It says no single thing, so you need to do multiple things, yeah? Get circumcized. 🤷♂️
Think you’re safe as long as you don’t also get a vaccine at the same time.
And with that, if possible at all, there is no single fix either.
Get fucked by an umbrella, RFK
Then go ask your boss if he can close it for you.
So if autism is a broader term that includes multiple conditions shouldn’t we stop using it and start using the names of the actual conditions? Isn’t it basically like hysteria which was split into epilepsy, dissociative disorders, personality disorders and so on?
Or we can take the process-based approach, where we stop caring about defining boxes perfectly and we start caring about patterns of thoughts and behaviors. This may sound woowoo or without empirical basis, but some of the most successful programs for verbal autism are based on these ideas, the AIM and PEAK programs.
I can understand why some would think that, as I once did.
Physical therapy is similar in that it matters very little why you have pain. You can improve or eliminate the symptom by appropriately exercising the affected areas.
Similarly, the behavioral treatments can take advantage of all humans’ natural adaptability to teach them to model and normalize more socially healthy behaviors.
I’m totally out of my depth in these fields but I have been convinced through firsthand experience via physical therapy. I’m sure it is not a catch all solution to just attack the symptoms, but it does have positive observable results and it therefore seems at least noteworthy.
I’m glad you’ve seen positive results with physical therapy.
I’d argue that a good physical therapist will understand the cause of the injury, so that they make a good treatment plan. Similarly, a good (contextual) behavior analyst will understand the causes for their patients’ difficulties, so that they can make a good treatment plan. When you know where you’re standing, it’s easier to move forward. That is why evaluation is crucial in both physical therapy and programs like AIM and PEAK.
They do for many, but sometimes I think they don’t know exactly what or it could be multiple things which is why it’s the Autism Spectrum and it’s easier to say they are “on the spectrum” or “autistic” if you can’t pinpoint exactly what.
IMO, as a ‘high-functioning autist’:
Yes.
The field of psychology is constantly redefining things based on ever shifting subjective analysis of behavioral patterns, and uh, being someone who very much prefers concrete, consistent, definable rules and categories, logically followable mechanistic processes…
Fucking yes, please, be more accurate and precise in a more objective way, based on far superior amethodology, fucking please.
I feel like at minimum we should have it broken up by different favors, kinda like how Asperger’s was a sub diagnosis under the umbrella of autism for awhile.
The DSM hasn’t even been updated with the differences in how women present ASD.
Having been born female, it’s amazing how I was diagnosed with everything from paranoid fucking schizophrenia to bipolar rather than acknowledge ASD/ADHD.
I remember cleaning out my locker once at the end of school and having a ton of crap just fall out on me. Absolutely no recognition of my lack of organizational/executive function skills because girls couldn’t possibly be ADHD/ASD.
When they’re understood well enough to have individual names, yes.
In most cases the diagnosis is observational. Blood tests and brain scans aren’t used for this kind of thing, although that could change someday.
Here’s the source instead of a paywalled news article https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-reveals-genetic-and-developmental-differences-in-people-with-earlier-versus-later-autism
And here is just the full open access paper:
Scientists from Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry found that children diagnosed as autistic earlier in life (typically before six years old) were more likely to show behavioural difficulties from early childhood, such as problems with social interaction.
However, those diagnosed with autism later on in life (in late childhood or beyond) were more likely to experience social and behavioural difficulties during adolescence.
I assume that the paper itself frames this a little differently, because what this is saying is trust there’s a correlation between when traits become noticeable and when people get a diagnosis. Which is what you’d expect. You don’t tend to diagnose people who don’t exhibit the traits required for diagnosis.
It is likely like cancer, a cluster of conditions that resemble each other in the end. Every time I hear someone talk about “a cure for cancer” I say cancer is like car accidents. You could find a car upside down on the side of the road but there could be many causes for it, drunk driving, asleep at the wheel, mechanical failure, hit and run, etc.
